


Dirtying the Paper

by inkblot_fiend



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: 5 Things, Character Study, Gen, plus one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 06:45:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4777454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkblot_fiend/pseuds/inkblot_fiend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All his life, John Childermass has found solace in charcoal and ink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dirtying the Paper

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from John Ruskin: "All art is but dirtying the paper delicately"

 

**1.**

It began as a means of keeping the younger children quiet of an evening when Joan was out about her other businesses. As her flesh-and-blood it fell to him to manage the rest of the gang when they were bedded down in their cramped attic lodging, which task he usually accomplished by means of storytelling.

His stories were long and full of violence and heroics, murder and adventure. He told stories of ancient kings and ancient magic and kept the attention of the children until they were able to sleep. Certain stories were firm favourites among the group – tales of King Arthur and the Raven King would be begged for almost nightly – and after a while John took to making drawings so that the youngest of them had something to look at when the stories became complicated. He drew into the grime on the floor with a finger, little representations of the major characters and the beasts that hunted them. When they went to bed he would scuff them over so that they could be redrawn the next night.

Little by little he improved on both stories and drawings, until his young charges would ask for particular scenes in particular stories – this fight with the dragon, that bloody battle; perhaps, John, the wicked faerie with the cruel eyes and wings as big as his body? - and John did as he was bid, creating worlds out of dirt.

**2.**

He took to charcoal when he was at sea. He drew for the amusement of his fellow sailors, who thought him a strange lad with a useful talent. They paid a penny for a sketch of a naked woman done on whatever paper they brought him. He did them on the backs of letters from home, on flyers torn from a wall in port, on receipts and even the odd page from the Bible. It was a clever sort of business: when the pictures smudged the men were obliged to return to young John Childermass and pay him another penny. He made a point never to draw exactly the same woman twice, so nobody could truly complain.

**3.**

Reading the cards felt a lot like telling stories. It was plain to him how one card fed into the next, how meaning was laid out like drawings on a dirty floor.

He stole ink from the quartermaster and used his pennies to buy good paper to copy out the figures under the scrutiny of the Basque sailor, who watched him all the while with a look of bemused fascination. He made the whole set in a frenzied afternoon, drawing until his hand ached and his fingers were stained. It was oddly like relief, to have the whole deck laid out in front of him. _His_ deck. His cards.

Over time the cards became worn and creased, one or two even torn by those over-eager for their readings, so John backed them in scrounged card and smoothed them under boxes and in general kept them better than any of his other few possessions, save perhaps his boots.

**4.**

At Hurtfew he drew for distraction. Service was difficult, it did not suit his temperament at all, and Mr Norrell was a cold and indifferent master. But he had read his destiny in the Cards and had never had any reason to doubt them. He would have to be patient, but he would find his reward.

He sketched in charcoal, little nonsense drawings of imagined flowers and smiling faces. He drew his fellow servants, tried to capture the fall of the maids' skirts or the line of the footman's body when he reached up to a high shelf. He sketched his hands, curled them into strange shapes and forced himself to look properly and get them down on the page. Little by little, he improved.

Norrell gave him the paper to practice his writing, not once asking whether Childermass could already do it. It was fine by him: he had planned to unveil his progress in a few months' time, let Norrell think him a quick study (he was in fact a very quick study, but Norrell did not notice the things he learned) and flatter Norrell's skills as tutor. In the meantime he used the paper to his own ends, as a balm to his fractious mind after a long day pretending to be dull.

**5.**

It took many year, but he came to respect Norrell, and Norrell to respect him, in his own way.

Norrell allowed him his own desk, gave him the liberty of ink and paper, the freedom of the Hurtfew accounts and, most telling of all, the key to the library. Childermass was the only other person who could see his way through the labyrinth, the only one to whom Norrell trusted the business of magic. It gave him a sense of pride, to have broken through his thick exterior and earned the right to sit in that shadowed place between servitude and friendship.

He was also permitted to read the books, when he had no other duties save to sit close by Norrell and await instruction. He read all kinds of things, but his appetite for books was not as insatiable as Mr Norrell's, so when he tired of magic and history he would slip a piece of paper across the double page spread of the accounts book (it being already completed to his satisfaction) and he would draw upon it.

There was not another man in England, he thought with a wry smile, who could draw a book, bookshelf or library as well as John Childermass.

There was likely no other man who could draw Gilbert Norrell so well, either, for when he tired of books he drew his master, captured him both in charcoal and ink. Though he rarely changed his pose there was often something worth recording in his expressions, a quirk of the eyebrow or a turn of the lip that changed the whole landscape of his face.

He kept these drawings in a box in his room, which fact he did not think about too closely.

In London he made bold drawings of all his new acquaintances, of John Segundus wreathed in snow on the steps of the Minster, of Mr Honeyfoot hopping with excitement to see magic done, of Henry Lascelles and Christopher Drawlight sprawled in armchairs and sneering in harmony. There was a quick sketch of Sir Walter holding forth in Parliament and an imagining of Lady Pole alive and smiling. There were possibly too many drawings of Jonathan Strange, with his face like mercury and his hair like knotted bracken. He had a very good rendering, he thought, of Arabella Strange smiling over a cup of tea in Norrell's new library, which he might have liked to show someone. This was a rare impulse, and, he decided, should be ignored.

There was always ink and charcoal on his fingers and under his nails. It did not concern him, nor Mr Norrell, though he never understood why.

He learned too late that Mrs Strange was interested in artistry herself. He thought it would have been pleasant to share a conversation with her on the subject. He tried on many nights to recreate her drawings of the King's Roads from memory, but it would usually end in a smudged and indecipherable mess. He was no good at landscapes.

**6.**

He did not draw so much after Norrell disappeared, taking most evidence of Childermass' previous life with him. His old drawings went up with the pillar, never to be looked on again. Except by Norrell or Strange, he supposed, if they should go digging through his former room.

His mind was therefore turned to the Book, and he made many a sketch in his efforts to transcribe it. Vinculus resisted translation, but in drawing out certain parts of him, in disconnecting his mind from the bothersome whole and focusing entirely on the shapes of this forearm or that knee, he felt he began to see the first signs of meaning.

For the first time in many years he was required to share his drawings, to let others look at the world as he saw it. It was difficult at first. He became surly and withdrawn and snatched back his pages as soon as he could, but over time he learned to let them go, to permit the pawing and ripping that was inevitable, and which oddly seemed to yield the most progress.

Between such meetings he found the time to take himself and his charcoal to the wild places, to the moors and the forests. There he set about learning as if from the beginning. He learned how to draw gnarled trees and slumbering mountains, how to wrestle the aching land onto paper so that in time he might travel to the King's Roads and bring back with him a proper account of all the things he would see, and tell such stories that all the children in England would beg to hear.

 

 


End file.
